Checksum Arcanius

My failure to convince Google to extend me an offer may have been the most fortuitous occurence that could have happened to me. Not getting a job offer from Google convinced me to cast my net further, and I have now decided to accept an offer from Facebook. The long and short of it is that starting in a little less than a year, I will be living in the San Francisco Bay area, eating warm lunches in the company cafe, and having a wonderful time learning and programming at one of the more interesting up-and-coming companies in the world.

I have much to be thankful for. A beautiful world, a luxurious life, a world-class education, a loving family, fun friends, and a bright future. What more could a guy ask for?

After graduation, I’m planning on having a blast this summer before I start work (wherever that is) in late August or early September. The list of possibilities is epic:

– Australia / New Zealand
– China ?
– Utah Mountain Biking (one of Scott’s ideas)
– East Coast Road Biking (ie, finishing unfinished work)
– Road trip to polish off my visited-states list

I have a big decision coming up. It will likely be between choosing to start my work career at Facebook, where I’ve heard good things are coming down the pipe in my direction, and Amazon, where I have had an offer on the table since mid-October. The Amazon offer expires December 1, so that is more or less the timeframe in which I am working.

I feel pretty good about this decision because, even if I make the worse of the two decisions without knowing it, it will still end up being a pretty good decision. Both companies are well-respected places to start a career and both offer interesting engineering challenges that need to be addressed. Each job would also have its pluses and minuses, which I will have to consider carefully once i actually have the Facebook offer in front of me and I can make the most informed decision possible.

After what I would call a successful interview at Facebook, I met up with Scott and his roommate at a sushi place in Los Altos. I don’t have a lot of experience with Sushi, but I decided to give it a real shot and enjoyed it a great deal. Scott, meanwhile, was scheming up a last-minute trip to Boston for a friend’s birthday party. I ended up dropping him off at SFO before returning to his place to crash for the night.

The cold ended up waking me up this morning before my alarm, so I enjoyed a luxurious shower before heading north to Burlingame to meet with the Cloudera folks. What was originally slated to be a short morning turned into an all-day affair with me using their internet to finish up and turn in my team’s Hadoop assignment (which Vince went way overboard with, in a good way — examples will be forthcoming) between interviews with three of the four company founders. I had met previously with the fourth founder (or perhaps the first founder) in Seattle.

After leaving Cloudera, I travelled north to San Francisco in pretty ugly traffic, where I met with Martin. We caught up on recent life events and ended up eating at a quirky little restaurant called “Wierd Fish,” which is really a misnomer because the food was all excellent, well-priced, and really, not that weird. After food we considered a photography trip, but ended up instead meeting up with former classmates Sierra and Justin at a local bar.

At this point, I’ve been up since 6:40 am, so I think its a good time to consider sleep.

Tonight, Spencer drove me to Sea-Tac, I boarded a plane which took off, and then promptly returned to Sea-Tac due to a malfunctioning landing gear sensor. We changes planes, and eventually took off again about two hours late. I arrived in San Francisco after midnight, picked up a rental car and drove down to Palo Alto. Later today, I will be interviewing at Facebook. Tomorrow, I have an appointment with Cloudera. Since I am down here, I might as well check out Meebo as well.

I blame the US Army.